Reston Crescent is a pleasant office with a great vibe and fantastic, diversified staff who are great to work with. Good benefits and above average pay for area. Abundant corporate and staff sponsored employee engagement programs and team building events. It’s truly a fun environment.

Cons

Executive leadership is so preoccupied doing everything except identifying and addressing the company’s true underlying challenges and incompetencies, which has left them hopelessly out of touch with their staff. They grasp onto every latest and greatest development and organizational methodology “du jour,” reap all of the glory for introducing a fresh idea to the company, and then push deployment of that fresh idea to their hopelessly overloaded middle management without any guidance, support and, in many cases, budget.

The biggest challenge of the company is that there are far too many people in the wrong roles. Technical people are doing process/project management work and analysts are performing in technical roles. People are shuffled around the company with no regard to their skill set or even job preference. While in many cases this shuffling is done for budget alignment and/or to save an individual whose role was eliminated, in the end this practice serves only to disrupt the masses, resulting in poorly defined and communicated processes, excessive task complexity and redundancy, and a lot of ticked off staff who are frustrated when they learn that the very task they’ve been putting their heart and soul into has also been delegated to another team or staff member.

Advice to Management

Use consultants to more clearly define teams and organizational roles and competencies, and assess staffing against those role definitions. Stand up and provide a budget for a legitimate internal mobility program to support efforts to get the right people in roles where they can truly be successful. You have a great staff and they deserve no less.

But it came at a cost. Say one bad thing and you're toast. You cannot disagree with officers, and if you do, your career will be put on hold through nefarious means - fewer staff reporting to you, no new projects, no visibility, etc. It's the slow death.

Pay is competitive, benefits are competitive, work from home policy liberal depending on your boss.

Cons

I worked for Fannie Mae for about 4 yrs, a little over a year as a contractor and the rest as an FTE. My nick name for Fannie Mae is "Stepford" after the famous original movie and remake. Everyone walks around there with a fake "installed" smile on their face. They will drink the Kool-Aid or they will be gone! I was pulled over by my boss in the hallway for coughing on a conference call. If you have seen the original or remake of the movie "Stepford Wives" you will get the idea. My professional IT career stretches 37 years and I've worked for many different organizations during that time. Never have I worked for an organization more concerned about the slightest “real” emotion emoted. No expressed frustration allowed, no expressed anger allowed. OK, I can hear you, this is someone with no social skills or someone who doesn’t know how to behave at work. NO, I can assure you I’m not some crazy overly emotional person who runs up and down the hallways screaming that the sky is falling or acting like my hair is on fire. I’m a real person, and real people occasionally get frustrated and angry.I transferred to my 2nd of two positions during my stint at Fannie a year before I was “laid off”. I had 4 managers during that 1 year period of time. What you see on Glassdoor reviews about re-orgs is absolutely true ─ very frequent. They also execute lay-offs about once a quarter. Maybe not unlike some organizations, but hopefully unlike most organizations, they use this lay off cycle to get rid of people they don’t like and don’t want to be bothered with going through formal HR steps that are required “in writing” by the organization to work with the employee to guide the performance of the employee to be more in line with their position or with the desires of their manager.I was told by a colleague that my boss told said colleague that he thought I was a horrible PM (20+yrs experience) and that he planned to “manage me out”, i.e. make me so miserable I would “self-migrate” . My bosses actions had already started to mimic that kind of behavior. He was visibly, with malice of foresight, getting in the way of me doing the job I was hired to do. After 37+ yrs as a professional, it’s not like I’ve never seen this behavior before, but it had never been directed at me personally. If you’ve never had this happen to you, well, great for you! If so, I feel your pain.This behavior stopped at some point after I confronted my manager, but the giant had just gone to sleep. Next lay off, yep, I was gone. Three days later, my old job was posted on the job boards. Never a single word was said to me by my boss that there was a single issue with my performance or any guidance to modify my behavior or deliver anything more or differently than the status quo.With the exception of my boss, and the director who must’ve been complicit, I loved the work I did at Fannie Mae. I was a “one stop shop” POC for the service my team provided. I received multiple service awards and multiple glowing emails from customers who were extremely pleased with the service I provided. I believe the issue was that I wasn’t subservient enough for my authoritarian boss who went to military boys school and has no college education what so ever.

Advice to Management

Acknowledge that people are human beings either at work or not. I'm not suggesting that the organization tolerate behavior that requires anger management, but you are creating a culture of emotional robots that is toxic. Also, the policy of quarterly lay offs to "manage out" those that management just wants to "get rid of" through no issue of lack of performance, but simply due to a less than perfect personality fit between employee and manager should be ended. Not to mention, if you have to re-org every quarter or twice a year you have a bigger issue.

I'm impressed by the level of investment Fannie Mae places on employee engagement. They have a lot of internal communications content, employee resource group activities, and events to help us stay connected to the work other teams are doing.

Cons

There are a number of people that need to be involved in approvals for things that seem minor because of how easily things can easily be misinterpreted. It's unfortunate but perhaps necessary.

Advice to Management

Continue the great work you're doing to include employee feedback in decisions that will impact them, and keeping them informed about the progress Fannie Mae is making.